I get a lot of questions about why honeybees make honey and how much can a beekeeper take from the hive. At this time of year, heading into winter, it's critical that each colony has enough "winter stores" - that is, enough honey stored to feed the colony through the winter. Since there are generally no blooms in winter, honeybees have nothing to forage. Plus, honeybees don't leave the hive when it's under 50 degrees so even if there were blooms left over, though they'd be dried up, a honeybee wouldn't usually leave to collect nectar in the winter.
The reason honeybees make honey is to provide nutrition and energy to help them survive until the first blooms in spring - usually dandelion and maple trees. To make honey in the spring, summer and early autumn, the older worker bees, called foragers, leave the hive and collect nectar from plants and trees. The nectar is stored in their honey crop, which is like a second stomach. When they return to the hive, they regurgitate the nectar to a house bee through a process called trophallaxis. Each honeybee that carries the nectar in its honey crop adds enzymes to the nectar, so each transfer from bee to house bee to house bee, increases the enzymes in the nectar. When the nectar is passed to a house bee inside the hive, that bee transfers it into a cell. The house bees then fan the nectar with their wings until it is only 18% water content and then cap it with wax, at which point it is finally honey. The entire process of adding enzymes and evaporating the nectar converts the nectar from sugar into fructose and glucose. It is this honey that larval and young honeybees consume starting in August to initiate a physiological change into 'winter bees.'
While springtime honeybees only live 4-6 weeks, the consumption of honey enables the developing winter bees to live 4-6 months, through the winter. This is just one adaptation that minimizes the drain on resources inside the hive during the winter when forage is scarce outside the hive. Therefore, the colony depends on an ample store of honey to help them survive through the winter. A beekeeper needs to ensure each colony has enough honey in its hive - usually about 40-60 pounds - so the colony doesn't starve.
Nature provides excess as an insurance policy. Just as maple trees provide extra sap such that a sugarmaker can collect 5 gallons in order to produce just 1 gallon of syrup, industrious forager bees collect more honey than the colony needs. Strong healthy colonies - ones with thousands of healthy forager bees - will produce an excess of honey which can be pulled from the hive and extracted.
With the recent unpredictable warmer winters, honeybees are a lot more active at times when they are usually clustered in their hive. As a result, active honeybees require more honey to satisfy their metabolism. To be safe, a beekeeper won't pull honey from a new or weaker colony, or in some instances, will supplement a colony with sugar fondant to prevent starvation. However, even in stronger colonies, I have always implemented what is called the 'mountain camp' method of feeding as an insurance policy. I place a sheet of newspaper on the inside top of the hive on which I pour four pounds of dry granulated sugar. Sometimes the colony devours the sugar in a week or two, sometimes they just don't need it. I've had a lot of luck over the past eight years and have not yet lost a hive over the winter. A lot of beekeeping is a combination of intuition and fate. A colony's fate depends a lot on the beekeeper's experience and decision, and with cooperation from the environment and weather, a strong healthy hive will have enough winter stores for both the beekeeper and its own survival.
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